Any spellcaster could casually declare himself absolute god-king of Earth. There's exactly diddly-squat that anyone could do against high level wizards.

Basically, this is a can of worms that nobody needs to open. Manshoon could declare himself God-Emperor and barring PIS, there is nothing anyone could do to stop the teleporting, mind-reading psycho who could be anywhere on the planet, listening in on your private conversations while chilling and enjoying a pina colada while disguised as the President of the United States.

Ah, but who's to say that there aren't people here to prevent exactly that sort of thing from happening?

Would it also be reasonable to assume Earth does not have a Weave like Toril? Spellcasting would be far more difficult and presumably far riskier to the caster. Earth building that have been remodeled over the centuries would be death traps when teleporting with 500 year old outdated memories.

-I really don't remember or not, but isn't it only heavily alluded but not actually downright said that the Imaskari abducted people from Earth and not actually explicitly said? Meaning there might not be Imaskari portals.

(A Tri-Partite Arcanist Who Has Forgotten More Than Most Will Ever Know)

Any spellcaster could casually declare himself absolute god-king of Earth. There's exactly diddly-squat that anyone could do against high level wizards.

Basically, this is a can of worms that nobody needs to open. Manshoon could declare himself God-Emperor and barring PIS, there is nothing anyone could do to stop the teleporting, mind-reading psycho who could be anywhere on the planet, listening in on your private conversations while chilling and enjoying a pina colada while disguised as the President of the United States.

Ah, but who's to say that there aren't people here to prevent exactly that sort of thing from happening?

Would it also be reasonable to assume Earth does not have a Weave like Toril? Spellcasting would be far more difficult and presumably far riskier to the caster. Earth building that have been remodeled over the centuries would be death traps when teleporting with 500 year old outdated memories.

It may or may not have a Weave, but given the battle between Elminster, Dalamar, Mordenkainen, and Shaaan the Serpent Queen -- as well as visits by other Realms mages -- we can assume that magic is functionally similar.

Remember, the Weave is basically just a power grid. Your house and my house might be wired different, but take a lamp from one, and it'll function the same in the other.

a) If there's a Weave or something that allows magic to work on Earth... and I think we must assume it does as far as the game goes (per Wooly's reasoning above)... how and why have there never been any public displays of magic, accidental or otherwise? Especially after the spread of multimedia with camera phones, are all attempts to "show the world magic exists" stymied in some way?

b) Elminster never does anything without a deeper, craftier reason, so why would he promote knowledge of Abeir-Toril through a game? Are gamers more likely to be accepting or understanding of other worlds through magic portals? Or does he need/want at least a segment of the population to know?

"The very best possible post-fourteenth-century Realms lets down those who love the specific, detailed social, political and magical situation, with its thousands of characters, developed over forty years, and want to learn more about it; and those who'd be open to a new one with equal depth, which there just isn't time to re-produce; and those repelled, some past the point of no return, by the bad-taste-and-plausibility gap of things done to the world when its guardianship was less careful."--Faraer

a) If there's a Weave or something that allows magic to work on Earth... and I think we must assume it does as far as the game goes (per Wooly's reasoning above)... how and why have there never been any public displays of magic, accidental or otherwise? Especially after the spread of multimedia with camera phones, are all attempts to "show the world magic exists" stymied in some way?

My personal thinking is that either magical knowledge was lost, here, or there is someone out there who is making sure it's actively suppressed.

If it's the latter, it could be something like Rowling's Ministry of Magic, or it could be some shadowy group that keeps that knowledge for itself, or even some form of Inquisition that zealously hunts down any practitioners and then deals with the witnesses, to keep anyone else from finding out.

And if it's the former, it could be because of that Inquisition group, or because mages went into hiding and died out, or because of cycles of high magic and low, like in Shadowrun.

There's also the Dresden Files approach: Magic exists, and no one is actively hiding it -- but anyone who sees magic assumes it was something else, because hey, everyone knows magic isn't real!

-Also, physics work differently, hence gunpower here and smokepowder there. Magic might work, but things might work in such a way that make it dangerous to use and it's not worth delving into to attempt, or the way to do so safely has been forgotten.

(A Tri-Partite Arcanist Who Has Forgotten More Than Most Will Ever Know)

a) If there's a Weave or something that allows magic to work on Earth... and I think we must assume it does as far as the game goes (per Wooly's reasoning above)... how and why have there never been any public displays of magic, accidental or otherwise? Especially after the spread of multimedia with camera phones, are all attempts to "show the world magic exists" stymied in some way?

b) Elminster never does anything without a deeper, craftier reason, so why would he promote knowledge of Abeir-Toril through a game? Are gamers more likely to be accepting or understanding of other worlds through magic portals? Or does he need/want at least a segment of the population to know?

Of course magic exists on Earth. There's this thing called "the internet" which is an advanced combination of scrying and other forms of divination, illusion, and enchantment.

-I really don't remember or not, but isn't it only heavily alluded but not actually downright said that the Imaskari abducted people from Earth and not actually explicitly said? Meaning there might not be Imaskari portals.

That's correct, and I personally prefer that they not be from earth. I actually prefer that given the amount of time... maybe the people from earth were instead people from that other world who used spelljamming to come to earth. I mean we have all these "UFO stories" for the Egyptians, etc... what if THAT is the truth. For that matter, combining the concept with some of the concepts of Stargate could be very interesting IF we were to discover that the Stargate isn't jumping within the same universe. The manifestations as "Goa'uld" without being "worms in a human host"... but rather avatars inhabiting a human host like happened in the ToT and the Jaffa race of human like beings would very much fit with the Mulans as a servitor race of divine beings with an Egyptian feel.

Obviously that world isn't WITHOUT magic of some sort, because portals did work there that the Imaskari used, and I'd bet the Imaskari used magic to enslave the Mulan people. The main question may come down to what level of magical skill did they have (i.e. were they like pre-Netherese humans in the northlands). After all, we know that the Imaskari got these humans "from two different regions and two different times" on the same world. So, each gate was not only opening a portal across space. They were also opening it across time. Heck, for all we know, they could have pulled those humans from Abeir (and before you poo poo that idea, look at the Untheric gods and tell me how many of them couldn't be gods of elements or negative energy, and thus matching up to the ideas of primordials... and then look at that primordial Ubtao... etc...)